[Gluster-users] set up unbalanced replication scheme?

[Ian Malone]

Hi,

Maybe this is crazy, but I've been wondering if it's possible to
unevenly mix replication and distribution among bricks?

The reason is we have an academic department with enterprise NAS and a
whole lot of linux workstations. The NAS sits behind a server which
serves things over NFS (we could serve directly from the NAS, but
currently in a bit of transition), this actually involves a VM on a
hypervisor cluster, so redundancy in the storage and server, and
things are also sent to an offsite backup.

However, we have home directories on those linux workstations mounted
from NFS, and a couple of remote(-ish) sites. So from time to time if
we have network issues, or an issue develops on the server that can't
be solved by a failover, linux users cannot get into a working desktop
environment.

I've been wondering if putting these home directories on glusterfs is
an answer. Well, of course it is, but I've also been wondering if it's
still possible to have that data replicated onto our NAS (and then
onto backups) so we have all those archives and snapshotting features
available. One option is to set up a couple of extra small servers,
for both offsite locations probably, which host the home directory
data (to be kept fairly small), set these up as a storage pool, and
have a brick on the NAS-backed VM too, set this up to replicate, and
then all three have a copy of all the data. However, if we wanted to
use smaller servers, or potentially even host those bricks on some (or
all of?) the workstations, it would be nice to have all the data
replicated on the brick on the big VM, but distributed on the other
bricks. Is there any way of arranging that?

Aside: if anyone has suggestions for a glusterfs host a bit more
sturdy than a raspberry pi, but a lot cheaper than a poweredge, that'd
be very useful!

Thanks,
-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk